Adobe announces Creative Suite 2
Adobe has just announced the release date and feature set for the next version of their Creative Suite, and after reading about the new features, I’m already itching to get my hands on Illustrator CS2.
I’m currently using an evaluation version of Illustrator CS, which offers significant improvements over Illustrator 10. But the new CS2 features look set to blow the first CS release out of the water.
The most significant, and the one that really has me salivating, is the Live Paint feature, which allows you to tint and shade artwork using overlaid paths that remain editable. This looks amazing, and could revolutionise the way I colour my images.
Adobe have finally integrated their old Streamline tracing application into Illustrator, with a feature called Live Trace. I never understood why they didn’t do this after they discontinued development of Streamline. I just hope that the results from Live Trace are more accurate than Streamline. It will have to be very good to compete with Freesoft Silhouette, which is what I use at the moment to convert my ink line art scans into EPS format.
The new stroke options look fantastic too. Finally you can position stokes outside, inside or centred to a path. About bloody time too!
It looks like I might skip Illustrator CS altogether now and upgrade to CS2 as soon as it is available.